Chris Sims has given more thought to Scooby-Doo than ever I and fifty of my closest friends combined have done. And he has discovered some things about the cartoon that have been sitting in plain sight but haven’t previously been noticed much.

I started with Scooby-Doo when Scooby-Doo started in 1969; the show was part of my regular Saturday morning cartoonfest (back when I voluntarily woke up before noon). It didn’t take me long to understand that Daphne would get the gang deeper into trouble, that Shaggy and Scooby would alternate between making a comic stand in the face of danger and running full-tilt from that danger, and that Fred and Velma would put their heads together and think their way to solving the mystery. There was always a con-man behind the curtain who would have gotten away with his nefarious schemes had it not been for those meddling kids. Sims tells us why this works and explores its larger implications.